The ongoing door-to-door NCD screening initiative in Maharashtra has discovered a 14% prevalence of hypertension and a 6% prevalence of diabetes among women living in rural areas, highlighting once more the fact that lifestyle diseases are no longer just present in metropolitan areas. Doctors draw attention to the fact that the state is not doing enough to implement the laws required to reduce the growing burden of lifestyle diseases.
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70,923 (14%) of the 5.04 lakh women who underwent screening for hypertension tested positive. Over 5 lakh people who were checked, approximately 30,000 had positive tests for diabetes. The NFHS-5 study discovered a prevalence of hypertension of approximately 23% among rural women, therefore the statistics may be underreported.
Additionally, there seems to be a lot of variety between districts. For instance, the prevalence of hypertension is almost 17% in Jalgaon and nearly 30% in Ratnagiri. There aren't enough localised measures to lower the prevalence of lifestyle diseases, a district health officer told TOI.
“The state has to do much more to increase awareness of the harms of junk food, excess salt and leading an inactive lifestyle,” the officer said, adding that deaths due to heart attacks and strokes are seeing a steady rise in rural areas too. Dr. Daksh Shah, joint executive health officer, reported that 3,132 instances of hypertension and 2,440 cases of diabetes were discovered among women in Mumbai.
The statistics from Maharashtra, according to Dr. Padmaja Jogewar, joint director (NCD), are not shocking, but they do highlight the fact that women in rural regions are not exempt from the twin epidemics of diabetes and hypertension. "Bad eating habits, sedentary lifestyles and stress are risk factors even in rural areas," she said.
